TheAppleBlog

Scheduling a Genius Bar or One to One training session appointment has never been that difficult. Just go to Apple’s web site, enter some information, and you’re done. But a new rumor over at AppleInsider suggests that it’s about to become even easier, thanks to a new in-house developed iPhone app that could be forthcoming soon from Apple.

News of the app comes via a “source that has proven reliable in the past,” though no further information is given. The app is said to be able to create appointments for both Genius Bar and One to One, and to view membership details for programs that require a subscription. No word yet on a street date for the app. Read the rest of this article »

OnLive made a lot of noise when it first appeared on the scene way back in March at the Game Developer’s Conference of 2009. It’s a service that’s said to be able to make a gaming machine out of any computer that can run the latest browsers, which would effectively end the madness that is PC gaming hardware upgrades. And now, it looks like it might be able to work on the iPhone, too.

What OnLive does is bypass the normal hardware barriers involved in PC gaming by streaming the game live to a user’s browser window from a server farm located nearby. The server farm deals with the game’s performance demands, and all the end user needs is a good enough connection to stream the content smoothly. Read the rest of this article »

There’s been talk lately that Apple’s execs are a little unhappy with the direction the iPhone and iPod touch have taken in regards to gaming. They didn’t anticipate such strong interest in gaming, it wasn’t really a key concern in their initial plans for the platform…and anyway, Stevey J’s not much of a gamer, and everyone knows to steer clear of Steve’s dislikes.

But as the Philosopher Jagger so wisely put it, “You can’t always get what you want.” And, as someone else once quipped, “If you can’t beat ‘em, join, ‘em.” To that end, Apple is advertising a job opening for a “Game/Media Software Engineer.” Based at its Cupertino hive mind headquarters, it’s a full-time position, and it sounds like Apple is taking it really very seriously;

The interactive media group is looking for a skilled software engineer who wants to work as part of a small highly motivated team to work on interactive multimedia experiences on the iPhone and iPod touch.

OK, sounds like gaming, right? I mean, sure, it could be the start of iLife for iPhone, but I doubt that. I suspect this is more likely the beginning of some home-grown games. It has done it before (it’s just, no one cared). Read the rest of this article »

This past Friday, your future ability to upgrade your Mac may have been significantly restricted. Psystar, the company that tried to create “open” Macs by running OS X on non-Apple hardware, suffered a quick defeat in its effort against Apple’s OS license restrictions.

No question this was a long shot and Psystar was going for the Hail Mary. Nonetheless, Apple’s arguments and victory in the case could have a chilling effect on any modification of Apple hardware and software. Will your next Mac be as locked down as the iPhone?

We euphemistically call gaining the ability to install any software on a iPhone “jailbreaking.” This allows you full administrative access to your iPhone to modify the software as necessary for your own use. You already purchased the iPhone hardware and a license for the Apple software necessary to run your iPhone–but are restricted in its use? Apple locks you out of making certain changes to your iPhone; every aspect of iPhone usage is controlled by Apple, yet Apple’s fickle and inconsistent App Store policies further complicate matters and virtually beg people to jailbreak their iPhone. Read the rest of this article »

AdMob, the mobile advertising firm that recently made headlines thanks to a Google acquisition, might have become part of the Apple fold if things had worked out differently, according to a report by Bloomberg that appeared this weekend. Apple reportedly approached AdMob with interest before the Google deal went down.

That’s according to “people familiar with the matter” speaking to Bloomberg. It isn’t clear which side of the deal the source was on, but he or she declined to go on record since the proposed talks were never made public. Apple is said to have contacted AdMob “a few weeks” before Google made its successful $750 million bid for the firm. Read the rest of this article »

As the weekend arrives it’s time to take another look at the latest iPhone apps to hit the store. As ever, I’ve selected four of the freshest picks for you to check out.

This week I’ve gathered a random assortment of app goodness for you to look at. There’s a great new sound toy, a tool for transforming your tweets into haikus, an app for Apple completists and a bombastic little tanks game.

My top pick for this week is Into Infinity, a new sound toy from the folks at dublab. Plus, I’ve also been looking at Twiku, iCombat Lite and Mactracker.

INTO INFINITY (Free)

The iPhone seems to be just the right platform for interacting with sound, so whenever a new sound toy hits the App Store I’ve just got to take a look. INTO INFINITY, an art and music exhibition presented by dublab and Creative Commons, lets you create your own swirling sound mixes and then tweet them out.

Once you’ve opened the app, orbs will start downloading to your mix space. Each orb is an audio-visual bubble, containing an image and a looped sample. Setting a variety of orbs in orbit immediately creates a musical milieu of sounds and melodies. Once you’ve created your perfect mix, hit the share button and you can send your creation to Twitter in a couple of taps.

The folks behind the app are pretty special too. On one side we have dublab, the label behind the most frequently listened to ‘net radio station (and a sterling podcast too). And then there’s the Japanese contingent of Creative Commons, providing forward-thinking licenses that, in this instance, allow us to legally share all the mixes made within the app.

Apart from being a fresh approach to creating mixes, INTO INFINITY is also worth supporting because of the app’s use of Creative Commons. I’m all for supporting sharing music — I’ve even made use of a stack of Creative Commons-licensed samples for my forthcoming album — so, for me, it’s doubly important to support these kind of initiatives. Grab the app, make some mixes and start sharing now.

Read the rest of this article »

Apple previewed its Upper West Side store in New York yesterday. Besides welcoming the media into the company’s latest example of retail minimalism taken to its logical extreme, Apple Senior VP Ron Johnson talked retail.

Glass and stone enclose 8,500 square feet of retail space on street level, topped with a glass ceiling 45 feet above, and with a glass spiral staircase leading to the floor below. According to Gothamist, which has some really nice photos, the street level enclosure could fit 11 of the glass cubes like the one in front of the 5th Avenue store.

“We opened our first store in Manhattan seven years ago, and the response has been incredible,” said Johnson, and not just at New York stores. A look at the numbers shows just how successful the Apple Stores have been. Read the rest of this article »

I’m not sure how many of you are playing Eliminate Pro on your iPhones, but I’m guessing it has to be a fairly high number, considering the app’s success since its recent launch. ngmoco’s ambitious first-person shooter for Apple’s mobile platform is third overall in the App Store’s Top Free list, but what’s more impressive is the number 22 spot it currently occupies in the Top Grossing list of apps.

That’s a huge step for the micropayments business model made possible by the introduction of in-app purchasing in iPhone OS 3.0. It marks the first real evidence that developers can make good money offering a “freemium” model on the iPhone platform, with users getting the initial product for free, but paying for in-game rewards and additional content. Read the rest of this article »

iPhone devs are a rebellious bunch, and they don’t like to be bullied by anyone other than their Apple, which both frustrates and affirms their existence. Now, in light of what some might call a campaign being waged against the App Store by a well-known trademark troll, many iPhone devs are protesting what they see as Apple’s cowardice in the face of unjust threats.

According to TUAW, the trademark troll in question is none other than Tim Langdell, founder of the “gaming company” Edge Games. In reality, Edge Games produces very little beyond copyright infringement suits, which it launches against any and all games that feature the word “edge” in their title. EA’s Mirror’s Edge recently fell between Langdell’s crosshairs, for example, despite the fact that the game itself bears no similarity to any of Edge Games’ roster of “planned” titles. Read the rest of this article »

This is one of those items I find so hard to get behind, rather like the infrequent (boring) updates to MobileMe. But here goes; Apple has ever-so-quietly launched a new web-based front-end to their iTunes music library titled “iTunes Preview.” It allows a visitor to view lists of music available on the iTunes Store via their web browser. There you go. That’s kinda it.

I’m going to assume 99.999 percent of our readers already use iTunes, and are probably intimately familiar with the drill by now; you’re reading a web page and you’re presented with a link to some music, tv show or maybe an app inside the iTunes store. You click the link and, after your browser does a brief Redirection Dance, iTunes pops-up, opens the iTunes store and, as you’d expect, dumps you out on the correct product page. Which is nice.

Except, this isn’t the case if you don’t have iTunes installed. If you’re one of the few people left in this crazy world who doesn’t have iTunes installed, clicking on one of those links previously dumped you (again, after the spastic redirection dance) on a web page commanding you to download and install iTunes. Which is not nice.

Well, all that has (sort of) changed. iTunes Preview exists as something of an interim step designed to partially improve the overall user experience, and partially to get the last remaining holdouts among us to install iTunes. See, despite the “Preview” part of its name, iTunes Preview doesn’t let you actually preview anything beyond Music. And then it’s not actually a preview. It’s just track-listings and user reviews. Read the rest of this article »

It boggles the mind, it really does. Microsoft tries so hard but for each step forward, it seems to take three steps back. Windows 7, Redmond’s answer to the train-wreck that was Vista (subscription required), has been out for just a matter of weeks and has managed to garner mostly positive reviews. But Microsoft can’t help itself. It has to do something silly, and, true to form, it has.

It seems Microsoft’s middle management can’t decide whether or not it ripped-off Mac OS X when it was redesigning its flagship product. This is the result of a bewildering comment from Microsoft Partner Group Manager Simon Aldous in an interview this week with PCR. He’s neither a developer nor a designer, and he didn’t work on Windows 7. But Aldous didn’t let that stop him saying this about Microsoft’s latest OS:

One of the things that people say an awful lot about the Apple Mac is that the OS is fantastic, that it’s very graphical and easy to use. What we’ve tried to do with Windows 7 […] is create a Mac look and feel in terms of graphics.

So. Aldous just made it clear; Windows 7 copies borrows its design from the Mac. Only, no, it doesn’t. Not according to a retort yesterday from Windows Communications Manager, Brandon LeBlanc. Writing on The Windows Blog, LeBlanc said:

An inaccurate quote has been floating around the Internet today about the design origins of Windows 7 and whether its look and feel was “borrowed” from Mac OS X. Unfortunately this came from a Microsoft employee who was not involved in any aspect of designing Windows 7. I hate to say this about one of our own, but his comments were inaccurate and uninformed.

The tech press is going bonkers about it, of course, but let’s be honest — when it comes to operating systems, the days when these two giants outright-copied one another and it mattered are far behind us. The common elements of an OS user interface are driven largely by user need/behavior. High resolution color displays and the ubiquity of the mouse and keyboard combo would have led to these similarities irrespective of the company behind them. Put simply, thirty-odd years of OS evolution would result inevitably in functional and aesthetic similarities. Read the rest of this article »

For Q3 2009, Apple’s iPhone accounted for 17.1 percent of worldwide smartphone marketshare, a new high for the company. That’s the good news from Gartner, and there’s more where that came from.

While overall mobile phone sales were flat for the quarter, smartphone sales were up 12.8 percent, some 41 million units. Carolina Milanesi, research director at Gartner, notes that smartphones “represent the fastest-growing segment of the mobile-devices market and we remain confident about the potential for smartphones in the fourth quarter of 2009 and in 2010.” How convenient for Apple. Read the rest of this article »

I love having the luxury of video capture on my iPhone 3GS, because it’s available to me anytime I need it. The only problem is, it’s either video or photo capture, so I’m potentially out of luck if I captured one and decidedly would have rather had the other. Yeah, I kind of like having my cake and eating it all in a single sitting too.

The good news — in this particular case at least — is that if you capture the event in video, you have a pretty good chance of getting decent still photos out of it when you’re through.

While this tip is aimed at iPhone 3GS users who can shoot their own video, it’s possible to use on any model when viewing video. The beauty of editing 3GS video that you’ve shot, is the frame scrubber that is made available for editing purposes. That feature just makes it a lot easier to pinpoint the image that you want to pull from the video content. (This becomes important when one frame is blurry, and the next is not.) Read the rest of this article »

Facebook for the iPhone is one of my most used applications, and I’m not alone as it’s amongst the most popular iPhone applications ever. This success is due to the size of Facebook itself, that the application is free, and that it is very well done. That last is due mainly to Joe Hewitt, who has been the main developer for Facebook’s iPhone application. Unfortunately that’s about to change, as Hewitt tweeted that he is moving “…onto a new project.”

At face value this may not be of any importance beyond a certain sadness to see a great developer leave a platform and an application so many love. In a conversation with TechCrunch, however, Hewitt made clear that the principal reason behind his departure from this project is his unhappiness with Apple’s management of the iPhone app store. Hewitt specifically mentions his philosophical opposition to the review process, indicating that it puts an unnecessary middleman between developers and users. He also fears that it sets a dangerous precedent for other platforms. Hewitt will be moving onto a web project at Facebook, which offers the opportunity to work on an open platform. Read the rest of this article »

Earlier this week, we reported that the first iPhone worm had been created. It was called “ikee,” and all it did was change the default wallpaper on devices to an image of Rick Astley with “ikee is never going to give you up” printed across the top. It was relatively harmless, if annoying, and the hacker responsible claimed that it was more of a warning than anything else.

Hopefully many heeded that warning, since now a new virus has surfaced that uses the same M.O. as ikee, but that has a much more malicious intent and effect. Specifically, the new malware mines personal data from your device, using the very same exploit ikee revealed earlier in the week. Read the rest of this article »

Apple apparently isn’t exclusively devoted to the idea of finger-based multi-touch input on all its devices, a recent patent applications shows. The patent application, found by Apple Insider, describes the use of a pen-like stylus to operate an “ink information” input system, and references tablet computing applications for the new tech by name.

“Ink information” refers to handwriting technology, specifically. The patent describes that previous attempts in this field, including in Apple’s own Newton device, have been insufficient to the task in the past. It suggests that the addition of an “ink manager,” a kind of go-between interpretive process, might reduce the occurrence of mistaken or misplaced ink detection. Read the rest of this article »

Safari version 4.0.4 is now available, the 30MB update promising improvements to “performance, stability, and security.”

Regarding security, the update addresses several potential “maliciously crafted” attacks–are there such things as benevolently crafted attacks? One uses a color profile, which is inventive, if evil. Others use XML, shortcut menus, or the user’s desire to visit web pages or FTP sites of questionable virtue. Read the rest of this article »

Universal Media announced awhile ago that it would be introducing iPhone control into some of its Blu-ray titles, starting with “Fast & Furious,” the Vin Diesel/Paul Walker romp that saw the lucrative car racing series return to its humble origins. Now, Universal is extending the iPhone/Blu-ray connection to a much wider swath of its library thanks to “pocket BLU,” a new app for Apple’s handheld devices.

pocket BLU is a free download from the App Store that allows your iPhone to become a remote control for operating Blu-ray discs from Universal. It won’t work with just any movie, of course. Blu-ray discs need to be played using a Wi-Fi connected player, for one, and the title has to be specifically enabled to work with pocket BLU, something which will be indicated by a conspicuously placed logo. Read the rest of this article »

Microsoft issued updates for Office 2004 and 2008 covering security issues for both versions, as well as an XML conversion tool. The Office 2008 update also includes a number of minor fixes to enhance stability.

Regarding security, both updates address vulnerabilities “that an attacker can use to overwrite the contents of your computer’s memory with malicious code.” Opening a “specially crafted” Word or Excel file could grant the attacker the same user rights as the local user, including administrative rights if applicable. The XML Conversion Tool was also updated to address this issue.

The 12.2.3 update for Mac Office 2008 update also focuses on stability. In Word, general crashing issues have been addressed. The update also fixes the annoying text-spacing bug when opening some Windows Office documents. For Excel, crashing issues when using PivotTables has been addressed. PowerPoint also addresses stability. Apparently, Entourage is stable enough, though there is a new junk mail definition file. Finally, Microsoft Document Connection for the Mac gets several minor upgrades and fixes.

While this minor update is welcome, many Mac Office users are waiting for information about, if not an actual release of, Outlook for the Mac. In August, we learned Mac Outlook will be out by Christmas 2010, will be built from the ground up using Cocoa, and will have many features we desire, but since then nothing. How about an update on that?

With the release of 10.6.2, Apple killed unsupported support for the Atom processor — the processor used in low-cost netbooks. Certain models of netbooks could run OS X quite easily, and people used them to make the Little Netbook Apple Refuses to Make. While it’s a stretch to say Apple has killed the hackintosh market, it’s certainly proving it isn’t going to sit around and ignore it.

The reaction has been interesting and varies from casual indifference, to the defense of Apple’s action, to thinking Apple cancelled Christmas. While I’ve been a vocal supporter of Apple’s right to continue to club Palm over the Pre syncing fiasco, I imagine it’ll sound hypocritical when I say I’m disappointed in Apple over this move.

Up until now, Apple’s stance with the hackintosh community has largely been don’t ask, don’t tell. The people who bought a netbook and, hopefully, bought a copy of OS X to install it, were aware of the risks of doing so. Getting it to run might involve waving a dead chicken at the screen, or it could be completely painless. However, the person undertaking this task knew of the risks. So, there was little harm done.

I’d like to take a look at some of the armchair theories I’ve seen, and offer my own armchair analysis of them. Read the rest of this article »